'We don't want insurrectionists': Justice Kagan blows up on Florida's social media law

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan grilled Florida solicitor Henry Whitaker over laws that would prevent social media companies from taking down objectionable content during oral arguments at the Court on Monday.

Florida and Texas have passed laws that limit what content social media companies can remove from their sites. Their laws are under review by the Court.

"I mean, we point out in our brief that when we think that if you had a, an internet platform that indeed had a platform driven message, was selective on the front end, democrats.com, I think that would be a very different kind of analysis compared to a company like Facebook or YouTube, who is in the business of just basically trying to get as many eyeballs on their site as possible," Whitaker said in defense of the laws during Supreme Court oral arguments on Monday.

"But why is it different?" Kagan asked. "Facebook, YouTube, these are the paradigmatic social media companies that this law applies to and they have rules about content."

"They say, you know, you can't have hate speech on the site," she continued. "They say you can't have misinformation with respect to particular subject matter areas and they seem to take those rules, I mean, you know, somebody can say maybe they should enforce them even more than they do, but they do seem to take them seriously. They have thousands and thousands of employees who are devoted to enforcing those rules."

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Whitaker noted that 99 percent of posted content was not censored on major social media sites.

"But that one percent seems to have gotten some people extremely angry," Kagan noted. "You know, the one percent that's like, we don't want anti-vaxxers on our site, or we don't want insurrectionists on our site."

"I mean, that's what motivated these laws, isn't it?" she added. "And that's what's getting people upset about them, is that other people have different views about what it means to provide misinformation as to voting and things like that. And, you know, that's the point."

Republicans, who passed the laws in the GOP-heavy state legislatures of Texas and Florida, argue that tech platforms are silencing conservative voices by removing what they feel is First Amendment-protected speech.

Watch the video below from the U.S. Supreme Court.